Students are usually poor, because alcohol is expensive, meaning that student houses tend to be barely better than hovels, filled with rats, odd stains and lots of empty bottles. But some student homes transcend from unpleasant places to live to places actively attempting to kill you. Read on to discover some of the most alarming stories about student housing.

(To protect the identities of those described below, I’ll be using fictional characters names, thus making this some of the most obscure fan fiction on the internet.)

Fireproof Fail

Let’s start with a house owned by a landlord who will go by the moniker of Hans Gruber. Hans was renting out a student house which had the unique selling point of being extremely fireproof. While in theory this seems like a great attribute for a house to have, the reason for this added protection was because every free space in the house was stuffed to the brim with asbestos. While very good at absorbing sound and fire, asbestos has the slight issue of causing lung cancer and many other unpleasant diseases. It wasn’t until the house was inspected that the students found out that they were living in one big poison cloud.

Bacon Explosion

Of course, students can make their home dangerous without outside help. Two engineering students who will henceforth be known as ‘Pinky’ and ‘The Brain’ lived in a house that had been refurbished, leaving an empty annex that used to be a kitchen. They asked their landlord if they could use it and the man, who I assume thought it would be used to store alcohol, agreed. Instead, Pinky and The Brain tried to build an unnecessarily complicated machine to cook bacon, because apparently engineering students have a lot of free time. While I don’t know the specifics of the device, I do know that it involved them stacking a great deal of petrol and welding equipment together in a small room. If they had lived in the asbestos house mentioned previously, this would have been fine. Alas, they were living in a house made of flammable materials and the resulting fire took out a lot of the building, but thankfully didn’t kill anyone.

They didn’t get their deposit back.

Carbon Catastrophe

This last tale begins with a landlord who I’ll call Voldemort. Now Voldemort wanted to rent out a house he owned but he had encountered one little problem: One of the rooms had a carbon monoxide leak. For those not in the know, carbon monoxide is the completely odourless and colourless gas that kills people in their sleep. Unfortunately, repairing this would be expensive. What’s a landlord unburdened by common sense or basic decency to do? Seal that room up as best he can and charge three students, who I’ll call Dumbo, Dopey and Donald the Duck, extremely low rent. They decided, probably while drunk, that the extra booze money was worth living in a house that had a room literally filled with murder-gas. Thankfully, despite everyone’s efforts to the contrary, no one died.

If you are about to become a student, don’t let these stories scare you. Just make sure to use a reputable online letting agent instead of some guy you met at the pub.

Do you have any horror stories about student homes?

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Robert Summersgill is a Creative Writing student currently living in a cardboard box. He writes for eMoov and likes to blog about video games.